15 october 2000

Before we start, a bit of housekeeping. The second phase of my house-moving is this week, so next week's column may be late. As of next week, I'll have left Edinburgh and will be living in Glasgow. This will be a culture shock. For one thing, Edinburgh's got some. But it will also mean that for the first time in three years, I will not be spending two hours a day on the train. We shall have to wait and see whether this is reflected in lower levels of irritability, and less sarcastic reviews.

The weekend after that will probably ALSO be late, because I'm going off to Yorkshire for a hillwalking weekend. It's work related, don't ask. And the weekend after that, bizarre as it may sound, I will be addressing a conference of trust and executry lawyers on the subject of the Human Rights Act 1998. If you're coming along to that, don't worry, it'll be great. I know loads. But that'll probably take precedence over the reviews too. So there WILL be reviews, but don't be too surprised if they're late for the next two or three weeks.

GENERATION X is the first of the Counter-X titles to complete its Shockwave arc, and it probably won't surprise you to hear that Synch gets killed.

After three issues of having the school become an increasingly hostile place to be, it's fairly obvious that Synch's role here is to get killed so that he can be an innocent and arbitrary victim. That means that this isn't really a story that's focused primarily on him - although admittedly it's given him a romance subplot with Monet which serves more to humanise her than to do anything for him. In fact, Everett's death seems to serve more as a catalyst for the rest of the team than as any kind of story arc for him.

But fair enough. It's not as if Synch was a character who was up to a great deal before Counter-X came along, and unfortunately, if it's cannon fodder you're looking for, he's the natural choice - he's a likeable enough guy, but not as compelling a character as the rest of the team. That means his death can (kind of) mean something without really costing the book a great deal. It's a harsh world out there. Even so, the story would probably have benefitted from giving Everett a little more prominence so as to make his death work more effectively as an ending for him, rather than implicitly relegating the character to an intermediate step for the rest of the plot to work through.

Adrienne's motive turns out not to go much deeper than malice, which in fairness was pretty evident from the word go. The nice touch is that, aside from planting the bombs, her plan really didn't involve doing anything more drastic than telling people the truth about the school and letting the anti-mutant prejudice do its own thing. That fits with the back-to-basics line this story arc's been taking. It's also a natural way of dealing with the obvious problems of the Massachusetts Academy format, although there's a glaring cop-out at the end when Emma hits the continuity reset button by wiping everyone's minds. (What, NONE of them told anybody else where they were going?)

Like the first Generation X Counter-X arc, this story is hampered by some decidedly mechanical plotting from Ellis (all the parents show up to riot at precisely the time time? Uh?), but it's carried by the more character-driven work from Brian Wood. And since this story gives Wood more to work with than the House of Correction, it's a decided improvement.

Steve Pugh is still labouring under inkers who don't seem to be doing much for his allegedly excellent pencils. Mind you, it's hard to imagine the fight scene between Emma and Adrienne looked particularly good to begin with. It's presumably meant to be the "Adrienne gets hers" climax, but ends up looking like a Dynasty catfight with some highly incongruous martial arts panels thrown in. Having Emma kill Adrienne off panel (supposedly after the original scene was edited out) also doesn't work.

Nonetheless, this is a reasonably successful second arc for Counter-X. All involved have done better in the past, but we're definitely back on track here after the highly dodgy House of Correction.

UNCANNY X-MEN #387 is a Maximum Security crossover, and it's actually pretty decent. For those of you not following the Maximum Security concept, the gimmick is that the alien races have got fed up of the humans getting in their way, so they've decided to kill two birds with one stone by declaring the solar system to be a penal colony, sealing it off, and dumping tons of alien supervillains inside. That means that crossover writers have got two options - they can play into the overall crossover storyline, or they can just do a story involving an alien and use Maximum Security as an explanation for why he's on Earth.

This issue goes for a bit of both, with Professor X and Lilandra turning up in a subplot to advance the overall plot, while the rest of the X-Men get on with the business of meeting some aliens who have a convenient excuse to show up. This time, a lone surviving D'Bari shows up with a bunch of henchmen in tow, with a view to killing Jean Grey (and therefore avenging the destruction of his homeworld by Dark Phoenix). Thus, while it's still technically a crossover, what we're really getting is a story designed to clarify Jean's status quo, and giving us some better explanation as to quite why she's adopted the Phoenix name.

The subplots this issue are mainly devoted to pushing events in numerous other series - we get a few pages for the Maximum Security crossover arc, a couple of scenes suggesting that we might care to purchase X-Men: The Search for Cyclops, and even a few pages trailing Storm's appearance in next month's Black Panther. All of this seems to impose a discipline that Claremont's stories have been lacking lately - the crossover format forces him to do this as a self-contained Phoenix story since the aliens won't be here next month, and everything else is dutiful set-up for other people's books. This results in a much more effectively structured story than we've seen in a while. The biggest problem with this story is probably that it's been lumbered with an awful lot of other books to set up, but it handles it as well as could be expected.

Yes, granted, there's yet another new villain, but this one's acceptable since he's got a perfectly decent motivation and he works as a foil for Phoenix to play off. It's perhaps a shame that Claremont's choice of exiled villains are Shi'ar Imperial Guardsmen who he kicked out for treason in the 1980s in a story everyone else seems to have forgotten (meaning that they were serving in the Imperial Guard earlier this year in the Inhumans miniseries and, in one case, last week in the Maximum Security prologue). But that's a minor point that doesn't really impinge on the story. Besides, this isn't something you can blame Claremont for.

Salvador Larroca joins us as the new regular artist. Some of Larroca's work with Claremont on Fantastic Four was bizarrely difficult to read, as he started using all kind of curious and unproductive panel layouts. He's back in more conventional territory here (as he was towards the end of his FF run), and producing something closer to what he's capable of.

If Claremont had been producing stories like this throughout his run, you would not have been seeing many complaints. Perhaps it lacks any really new point to make about Jean, but she's a character who needed a stock-taking issue. Perfectly decent.

When they killed off Cyclops, the plan was supposedly to leave him dead for a while. Since he was in the film, that always seemed rather dubious planning (as did killing him in the first place), and X-MEN: THE SEARCH FOR CYCLOPS sets about the task of bringing him back.

In stories of this sort, it's inevitable that Scott will be found, so wisely, writer Joe Harris has not attempted to create any tension around the subject. We all know he's coming back, the only real question is what he's been up to in the meantime. And that's what the issue chooses to focus on.

Admittedly, Harris does not have the best source material to work with here. One of the most bemusing things about the end of the Twelve storyline is why characters wandered around afterwards as if they had seen Apocalyse die, when he quite clearly escaped while they were looking straight at him. Harris opts to have an amnesiac (ah, that old favourite) Scott/Apocalypse merger wandering around working as a sailor, as the story seems to set up the X-Men hunting down Scott, and some of Apocalypse's henchmen hunting down him. That does, unfortunately, mean that we've got here a book with Ozymandias and Gauntlet as the main villains, neither of whom are all that interesting. But it's a decent enough idea given what Harris has to work with.

Nonetheless, and for all the attempts to package this as some kind of prestige project (the design shamelessly mimics the layout for Harris' earlier Children of the Atom), this is fairly ordinary stuff. The concept is inherently limiting, and you can't really blame those involved for that, but nonetheless this feels more like something Marvel need to get out of the way than a story anybody felt a pressing need to tell.

A couple of bizarre elements also niggle with me. Having Cyclops as a sailor makes perfect sense, since it's about the only thing he can do outside being a superhero. But why is he working on what appears to be the world's last surviving commercial galleon? Is Egypt still in the 1800s? Also, having Scott's new friend call him the Arabic for "Slim" (his nickname back in the Silver Age) would have seemed less contrived if Tom Raney had actually drawn him slim - or even slimmer than the character who coins the name.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this, but it doesn't catch my imagination. It's got a job to do, and for the next three months it's going to get on with. Such is continuity.

An ongoing HARLEY QUINN title does not, at first sight, seem like a terribly clever idea. Very few villains sustain their own books. Very few sidekicks sustain their own books. Very few females (in the current market) sustain their own books. As a villainous female sidekick, Harley does not seem a safe bet.

But supposedly everybody loved her in the animated series (which I don't watch), which got her introduced into regular continuity, and now... this. A regular title for the Joker's girlfriend? Well, stranger things have been known, I suppose. Given that the book has a creative team of Karl Kesel, Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson, I think it's fair to say that the book is not going to be taking the grim psychological route. But it begs the question of where on earth you go with a character like this, especially if you're trying to maintain a relatively light tone.

The cliche would be to set about turning her into a hero by issue #3, and while that doesn't happen this time around, the focus is definitely on Harley's relationship with the Joker, with a fairly obvious leaning towards breaking them up in early course. Mind you, splitting them up is a sensible thing to do whatever else you want to do, since the character can't be allowed to live in the Joker's shadow when she's meant to be the protagonist.

The main difference between the DCU's Harley and her animated counterpart is, so I'm told, that in the animated series she and the Joker were genuinely in love. In the DCU, Harley is besotted, and the Joker is taking advantage of her. There's an interesting attempt to take advantage of this, with the opening scene and a couple of panels dotted throughout the story drawn incongruously in the animated style. This is presumably meant at once to symbolise Harley's deluded point of view, echo the animated continuity for those familiar with it, and subconsciously evoke the reader's prejudice that fewer lines means simplistic psychology, thereby reinforcing our belief that Harley's got it horribly wrong. (See? I *can* do academic-style analysis of form!) Once you twig to what's going on, it's quite effective - although using it for the opening scene may have been a mistake, since my immediate thought was that I was reading a dream sequence.

Having said that, there's a couple of points throughout the issue where it's obvious that Harley's aware on some level that all is not well, and by the end it's pretty clear. She also drops out of her "loveable eccentric" mode for these points. I'm wondering whether Kesel is going for the line of least resistance here, in which case he's probably making a terrible mistake. The line of least resistance is to try and turn Harley into a protagonist people can empathise with by turning her into a hero and toning down her eccentricities to normal levels (by genre standards). Certainly in her current form she can't function as a normal protagonist - she's just too damn weird - but to turn her into a conventional character would compromise away everything people actually like about her. Unless you've got a dazzling idea to replace it with, that's risky. Of course, unless you've got a dazzling idea for a story that can work with her as protagonist, that's risky too. The solution, if you ask me, is not to give her her own book in the first place, but there you go.

As for this issue... it's basically set-up for the Joker and Harley's relationship, welded onto a rather contrived story about the Joker going after somebody who's building a Gotham theme park, all in full Adam West style. The character is the interesting thing about the book, but I haven't a clue how to make her work in the long run. Mind you, I thought the same about Batgirl at first, and they proved me wrong. This is entertaining enough that I'm going to stick with it and see if Kesel's got a way around the problems, though, which is a start.